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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Identification Crises: Victorian Women and Wayward Reading Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/67q569qb Author Knox, Marisa Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Identification Crises: Victorian Women and Wayward Reading By Marisa Knox A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Ian Duncan, Chair Professor Catherine Gallagher Professor Carla Hesse Spring 2013 1 Abstract Identification Crises: Victorian Women and Wayward Reading by Marisa Knox Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Ian Duncan, Chair In the Victorian period, no assumption about female reading generated more ambivalence and anxiety than the supposedly feminine facility for identifying with fictional characters and plots. Simultaneously, no assumption about women’s reading seemed to be more axiomatic. Conservatives and radicals, feminists and anti-feminists, artists and scientists, and novelists and critics throughout the long nineteenth century believed implicitly in women’s essential tendency to internalize textual perspectives to their detriment. My dissertation re-thinks the discourse of “crisis” over women’s literary identification in opposition to increasing representation of what I call “wayward reading,” in which women approached identification as a flexible capacity instead of an emotional compulsion. I argue that the constant anxiety expressed by Victorian writers about women’s absorption in literature helped to reify irrational and involuntary identification as the feminine norm, even while accounts of women’s elective reading response defied this narrative. This study analyzes and contextualizes three major types of deliberately wayward reading in the Victorian era, which challenge the premises of gendered identification that often obtain in criticism and pedagogy today. The first chapter explores the imaginative license granted to women readers, as opposed to women writers, to identify with male subjects. While such literary identification with men was believed to bolster women’s marital and relational sympathies, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh depicts an artistic form of masculine identification that, unlike marriage, preserves the integrity of female subjectivity. The second chapter examines the multiple crises prompted by the sensation genre about the representation of female characters, which mirror contemporary concerns about the representation of women sought by the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement. I contend that the sensation novels of Mary Elizabeth Braddon do not exploit the reader’s “feminine” nerves, but rather facilitate morally conscious, elective identification. By the fin de siècle, a new crisis emerged over the possibility of women’s under-identification with literature as a result of their increased access to higher education and professionalization. George Gissing’s New Grub Street and The Odd Women, as well as the New Woman novels of Charlotte Riddell, Mary Cholmondeley, and George Paston, all engage with the concept of female literary detachment as a kind of morbid pathology: a trope that demonstrates how necessary emotional identification was and is for defining femininity. 2 The concluding chapter of the dissertation applies these examples of wayward reading and the empirical research of recent cognitive poetics and psychology studies to pedagogy, in order to recuperate identification as a learning technology in the modern classroom. I argue that understanding these historical contexts of reading response provides students with awareness of the flexibility of their own interpretive skills—their own capacity for wayward identifications— as well as a new way of examining the representation of reading in nineteenth-century literature. i Dedicated to the memory of my mother and perpetual inspiration, Valentina Palacios Knox (December 12, 1949-September 28, 2009). ii Acknowledgments The greatest share of my gratitude belongs to Ian Duncan, the chair of my dissertation committee, who shepherded this project at every stage with extraordinary encouragement and advice on all matters great and small. I was also extremely fortunate to benefit from the trenchant insights and suggestions of Catherine Gallagher and Carla Hesse, the other members of the committee. Kent Puckett planted the germ of the first chapter by assigning Aurora Leigh in his graduate seminar, and continued to give me crucial and generous guidance throughout this project. Randall Smith, Ruth Baldwin, Catherine Cronquist Browning, Slavica Naumovska, and Sangina Patnaik all graciously read early drafts of my chapters and offered brilliant feedback and just criticism. Matthew Knox and Samira Franklin tirelessly discussed the dissertation with me, helped clarify my ideas, and cheered me onward with their support. All of these mentors, friends, and family kept me from straying too far into the “Valley of the Shadow of Books” and helped me move forward with my writing. For that, I am ever thankful. 1 Introduction I therefore presume to tell your ladyship, with great confidence, that your writers have instituted a world of their own, and that nothing is more different from a human being, than heroes or heroines.1 One never reads except by identification. But what kind? When I say identification, I do not say loss of self. I become, I inhabit. I enter. Inhabiting someone at that moment I can feel myself traversed by that person’s initiatives and actions.2 Identification has a bad reputation. It’s a messy term with overlapping meanings across multiple disciplines and fields: aesthetic and ethical philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, film and media studies, and literature. Even within literary studies, it has a plethora of definitions. Sometimes it’s anathema to literary criticism, modified by derogatory words like “unsophisticated” and “naïve,”3 or more perniciously, “imperialistic and narcissistic.”4 Occasionally it’s edified by association with sympathy, as in “sympathetic identification,” but then any distinctions between identification and sympathy dissolve into generalized emotional response. This dissertation provides an explanatory history for one broad strain of identification’s representation as a gendered reading response, and traces an alternative history of identification as a deliberate, “wayward” practice. The kind of identification I refer to in the dissertation title is actually secondary among definitions of “identification,” the primary being the act of recognition (“Can you identify the suspect?”). This secondary definition is either explicitly or implicitly reflexive: the “state of being or feeling oneself to be closely associated with a person, group, etc., in emotions, interests, or actions; the process of becoming associated in this way.”5 Many of the distinctions of identification in media studies describe the motivation for the association between identifier and identificand: attraction to or affective reaction to a character (parasocial interaction, e.g. “I love Heathcliff”), affinity (similarity identification, e.g., “I am like Heathcliff”) with a character, or admiration for a character (wishful or aspirational identification, e.g., “I wish I were like Heathcliff”).6 Sometimes these motivations coincide, sometimes not. Our “favorite” characters are not always those who bear resemblance to our past or imagined future selves. The nature of the identificand is also heterogeneous. A reader claiming to identify with a character, Deirdre Lynch observes, blurs “crucial distinctions between a reader’s empathy with who a character is and her empathy with what the character feels or does.”7 The question is, do we identify with our sense of a character’s character (which we might love, or admire, or see as similar to our own), or with a character’s position or perspective in the text (which we might have experienced in our past or are merely able to imagine)? Relatedly, is identification a “feeling” or perception of association, or the participatory act of associating oneself imaginatively with a subject? If identification is an act, do we project ourselves with our own personal characteristics into a subject’s position (“I am imagining myself in Heathcliff’s shoes”), or are we momentarily suspending our own self-awareness to internalize the character’s perspective (“I am Heathcliff”)? The sheer variety of phenomena attributed to “identification” has prompted criticism of the term itself as a meaningful signifier. Communication scholar Martin J. Barker disparages its “eel-like quality,” and complains, “What is distinctive about ‘identification’ is its persistence, 2 and its hardly questioned status…It is just too convenient.”8 While “identification” both as concept and term has often been “questioned,” Barker is right to decry casual critical usage of the word as “little more than a synonym for ‘feeling engaged.’” Perhaps given my own orientation in literary studies, I am more comfortable with the slippery qualities of identification, seeing ambiguity in terms of multiplicity instead of obscurity. A recent cognitive science study of the phenomenon likewise hypothesizes that “thinking about identification as a monolithic concept may be misleading. Instead, identification
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